Alternatives to chainsaw
Other tools in this directory that do similar work, with a verified install command for each. chainsaw itself: install chainsaw.
MarkText
📝A simple and elegant markdown editor, available for Linux, macOS and Windows
Recordly
Create polished demo videos without editing skills. Mac/Windows/Linux
pgvector
Open-source vector similarity search for Postgres
sonic
🦔 Fast, lightweight & schema-less search backend. An alternative to Elasticsearch that runs on a few MBs of RAM
Reactotron
A desktop app for inspecting your React JS and React Native projects. macOS, Linux, and Windows
Xournal++
Xournal++ is a handwriting notetaking software with PDF annotation support. Written in C++ with GTK3, supporting Linux (e.g. Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, SUS
hack-browser-data
Extract and decrypt browser data, supporting multiple data types, runnable on various operating systems (macOS, Windows, Linux)
opensearch
🔎 Open source distributed and RESTful search engine
lua
A copy of the Lua development repository, as seen by the Lua team. Mirrored irregularly. All communication should be through the Lua mailing list http
ripgrep-all
rga: ripgrep, but also search in PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, zip, tar.gz, etc
mapscii
🗺 MapSCII is a Braille & ASCII world map renderer for your console - enter => telnet mapscii.me <= on Mac (brew install telnet) and Linux, connect wi
IPFS Desktop
An unobtrusive and user-friendly desktop application for IPFS on Windows, Mac and Linux
xxh
🚀 Bring your favorite shell wherever you go through the ssh. Xonsh shell, fish, zsh, osquery and so on
Gitify
Git notifications on your menu bar. Available on macOS, Windows & Linux
pgrok
Poor man's ngrok - a multi-tenant HTTP/TCP reverse tunnel solution through SSH remote port forwarding
uncover
Quickly discover exposed hosts on the internet using multiple search engines
tinysearch
🔍 Tiny, full-text search engine for static websites built with Rust and Wasm
Wasabi Wallet
Open-source, non-custodial, privacy preserving Bitcoin wallet for Windows, Linux, and Mac
dwarfs
A fast high-compression read-only file system for Linux, FreeBSD, macOS and Windows
weggli
weggli is a fast and robust semantic search tool for C and C++ codebases. It is designed to help security researchers identify interesting functionali
msgvault
Archive a lifetime of email and chat. Offline search, analytics, and AI query over your full message history. Powered by SQLite and DuckDB
sleek
todo.txt manager for Linux, Windows and Mac, free and open-source (FOSS)
dislocker
FUSE driver to read/write Windows' BitLocker-ed volumes under Linux / Mac OSX
rtaudio
A set of C++ classes that provide a common API for realtime audio input/output across Linux (native ALSA, JACK, PulseAudio and OSS), Macintosh OS X (C
How we picked these
We match on what the tool does and how it installs, then order by how widely each project is used. We're not saying these are better or worse than chainsaw — that depends on what you're building. We're saying they're the projects people reach for in the same situations, and each one has an install command we checked against its documentation.
chainsaw is developed by its own authors and this page is an independent reference; we are not affiliated with or sponsored by any project listed, and nothing here is a paid placement.